“... points of the novel (others were Warhol and Werner Herzog and Kierkegaard and Otto Rank and Oscar Wilde) was the first season of The Hills, an American structured reality show that began on MTV when Heti was 28: ‘I was like, what if we cast ourselves as those girls have been cast?’ The Hills followed blonde best friends trying to make it in ...”

“... and hybrid) modern art. When Bomberg went to Paris with Epstein in 1913 – in the wake of the Oscar Wilde tomb scandal Epstein had all the right contacts – he went straight to the source. ‘Picasso,’ he reminisced later, maybe forcing the note a little, ‘was appreciative of my aims.’ (What did Bomberg show him? The breakneck drawings of ...”

“... its own intentions. Benjamin Markovits, The Syme Papers Poor Bunbury died this afternoon. Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest If everyone says Tom did it when the man who did it was Will, the result is what one calls an error, and Will is done out of his due. If while everyone says Tom did it you see Will and hail him as Tom, error ...”

“... to Der Sandmann and The Winter’s Tale and Cinderella, there are described performances of Wilde’s Salome, Barrie’s Peter Pan, Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, at least three separate versions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and two plays written by Olive Wellwood and staged by August Steyning, The Fairy Castle and Tom Underground.) Even her ...”

“... the narrator responds to the ruling with bravado: ‘First there was Socrates, then Jesus, then Oscar Wilde, and now me. We’re a select few … No great life is complete without a trial, you have to ruffle a few feathers, you can’t just be a good little child all your life.’ She decides to become a ‘lonesome cowboy’. Sex is the answer, the ...”

“... others to toil for profit. But is work fun? And could we ever abolish its most degrading forms? Oscar Wilde – who bought Morris wallpapers – wondered what such ideals meant to the street sweeper forced to labour for eight hours at the ‘slushy crossing’.Morris took refuge from such conundrums in stories serialised in socialist papers and then ...”

“... We all​ judge by appearances. Oscar Wilde said that it is ‘only shallow people’ who don’t, but it might be truer to say that they fail to pay attention to the judgments they are making while they dismiss appearances as superficial. Nothing, as Wilde added, is more superficial than thought ...”

“... as Miss Lotti, the parasol-carrying, self-effacing homebody, who broke with Harland because Oscar Wilde’s trial besmirched the Yellow Book’s reputation, and as Charlotte Mew, the poet and headbanger, who fell for Harland’s assistant Ella d’Arcy, and pursued her to Paris. For two months in 1902 Mew gloomed up and down the Champs ...”

“... the thrill and satisfaction that accompany his tableaux of chaos and maiming. It is the ghost of Oscar Wilde, whose loyal confidant Robbie Ross had befriended Owen some months before the drafting of ‘Strange Meeting’, who haunts the violent Liebestod enacted in the poem’s conclusion:I am the enemy you killed, my friend.I knew you in this dark, for ...”

“... she hoped ‘consciously or subconsciously’, to have him out of the country during the trial of Oscar Wilde. We may well be incredulous, especially when it is further conjectured that she might have stopped taking newspapers at the same period. It was a school holiday and the Forsters had a Whichelo relation in Rouen, perfectly ordinary reasons for the ...”

“... children. Such a positive attitude to bestiality, presented with a sophistication reminiscent of Oscar Wilde or Maurice Chevalier, is implicitly supported by the book’s many illustrations, which are for the most part frankly pornographic. They are seldom mentioned in the text and often bear no perceptible relationship to it, but Dekkers does discuss ...”

“... newly-appointed dramaturg of Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre, someone who could claim, like Oscar Wilde, a symbolic relation to his time. The husband whose agonising death from emphysema she watched in California in 1980 (this is the book to give a smoker you love for Christmas) was a lost, wasted man whose misery and sense of exile stare ...”

“... from barbarism to decadence is praised as if it had been conceived by Muggeridge, instead of Oscar Wilde. When Professor Hunter finds time to read other philosophers he might discover that such an example of an epigram being borrowed, and muffed in the borrowing, is characteristic of Muggeridge’s essentially second-hand intelligence. But on the ...”

“... as I found I had to create characters who could conceivably have had memories of, say, the age of Oscar Wilde, Lawrence of Arabia and of Bloomsbury. Hence the Claridge’s couple, Hugh and Moggie. When I subsequently hit on the (fairly obvious) idea of a school play, with the school itself a loose metaphor for England, it resolved much that had made me ...”

“... by little, as the fires were lit, the smoke and the mist returned.’ This sort of fogolatry made Oscar Wilde observe that London fogs ‘did not exist until Art had invented them. Now, it must be admitted, fogs are carried to excess. They have become the mere mannerism of a clique.’Joseph Conrad used fog judiciously but to fine effect when writing ...”